Groundhog Day for Oil

Wish it weren’t so, but I fear my lasting memory of many trips to Prince William Sound will be of hunched-over workers with toothbrushes, trying to scrub black tar from shivering birds and sea-worn rocks in the Alaska spring of 1989.

All the images were staggering: The birds looked lost and stunned, their coats of warmth matted black, their wings greased by hydrocarbons that would eventually kill most of them. The inlets of that most Edenic of sheltered seas had a sickening sheen, with a smell that made you nauseated and stayed with you through sleepless nights. Harder still was the sight of fishermen — tough, independent, weather-callused men — weeping for their loss.

Agence France-PresseCleanup workers scrubbed rocks on an oil-covered beach in Prince William Sound after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

But what stayed with me were those hundreds of workers with toothbrushes. They would labor all day, and maybe clean a rock or two — Sisyphus on the sound. After a while it was all public relations theater paid for by Exxon,

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whose tanker went aground and spilled at least 11 millions gallons into one of the richest marine cornucopias in the world.

Here now is the sad replay in the Gulf of Mexico, with that life-killing choreography. Then, as today, an oil company deployed booms and dispersants, tried to buy off fishermen with quicky legal settlements, and made resolute promises about restoration and doing the right thing.
In Alaska, we saw how that turned out: after nearly two decades of legal foot-dragging, Exxon got exactly what it wanted: a Supreme Court that consistently backs the powerful and well-connected reduced punitive damages from $2.5 billion to $500 million — in a good year, just a single week’s profit for the company.

It’s a waste of hope to wish that BP will be any more responsible or effective than Exxon was. And maybe it’s not their fault, in one sense: oil spills are acts of blunt-force trauma, and the remedies for cleanup remain primitive. The toothbrush brigade will soon be out, trying to save those nesting brown pelicans, symbols of a delta made rich by sediment carried from the Heartland.

The immediate reactions — a pause to President Obama’s short-sighted plan to open vast areas of coastal waters to offshore drilling, and maybe a requirement for automatic shutoff valves on deepwater wells — will make most of us forget and move on. The summer driving season is just around the corner and no one wants to pay more than $3 a gallon for gas.

On energy, amnesia is the American way. Things lumber along, 300-million-year-old fossil fuels are pulled from deep inside the kingdoms of desert despots and shipped to our shores. It’s slow-motion suicide, of sorts, to the planet — and I’m no worse or better than anyone else who uses oil for everyday comforts — but we don’t see the wounds until a spill brings it all home.

Suddenly, alarms are sounded. Brows are furrowed. Promises are made. This time, with fears that the Gulf spill will be even larger than the one in Alaska, lessons will be learned, yesiree. But soon enough, we’ll go back to planting trees on Earth Day, feeling good about recycling — Hooray for us! We’re green and cool — while resuming the old routine. That is: a nation with five percent of the earth’s population consuming about 23 percent of the world’s oil output, glug, glug, glug.

Associated PressSweet crude oil streaking the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.

Not all hope has to be sworn off. We can wish that “drill, baby, drill” will be retired as a slogan and as the energy policy of one party. When crowds of mindless zealots shouted those three words at campaign rallies headed by Sarah Palin — whose husband was once a real fisherman in Alaska — I thought of Homer Simpson calling for more beer while thinking it was a good way to lose weight.

Here was a chant, inspired by arsonists and rioters in the 1960s, posing as a political solution. The only thing more mindless than “drill, baby, drill” was the latest self-serving distraction to spill from Newt Gingrich’s bag of cynical ideas. He called his movement: Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less. Because, of course, it’s all pain-free, and very uncomplicated.

If you go on Gingrich’s Web site, you can still sign a petition demanding more drilling — now! — and through links, buy a t-shirt with the same brain-dead slogan. And then there’s also a curious last-minute call by Gingrich for, um, an independent investigation into the, uh . . . tragic oil spill in the gulf.

He’s right on two points. We can drill here. We can drill now. But pay less? No, we always pay more, though the full tab takes a while to show.

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Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears here on Fridays. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America” and, most recently, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” As of October 2013, Timothy Egan’s column can be found in a new location in the Opinion section »